Talks
City Lights Dilexi
A Gallery & Beyond Symposium
City Lights Books event celebrating the publication of Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond. Organized in connection with research from Label Curatorial, the program explores how San Francisco’s Dilexi Gallery became a vital meeting ground for contemporary art, experimental music, film, and performance in the late 1950s through early 1970s. The event highlights the gallery’s role in fostering overlooked collaborations among artists and composers whose interdisciplinary work helped shape later developments in minimalism and conceptual art.
Dilexi Gallery and the Anderson Collection
Stanford
This program explored the history of the Dilexi Gallery and the Anderson Collection artists represented including Jay DeFeo, Manuel Neri, Roy DeForest, and more. The conversation featured Jim Newman, co-founder of the gallery; Laura Whitcomb, author of "Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond;" and Jason Linetzky, director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Hosted by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University on January 25, 2024.
Norman Zammitt
Karma
On the occasion of Norman Zammitt exhibitions at Karma in Los Angeles and New York, two public conversations explored the artist’s legacy and the luminous color systems of his celebrated Band Paintings. In Los Angeles, Norman Zammitt: Band Paintings 1973–1992 marked the artist’s first solo presentation in the city in over a decade, highlighting the horizontally striped canvases he developed through a meticulous, self-devised color theory and pigment-mixing process. A related program in New York accompanied Norman Zammitt: A Degree of Light at Karma’s 26th Street gallery, featuring a conversation among Cecilia Alemani, Sarah Crowner, Jeremy Frey, and Laura Whitcomb, who is contributing a catalogue essay for the forthcoming monograph on the artist. Together, these events brought artists, curators, and scholars into dialogue around Zammitt’s distinctive approach to light, color, and perception.
Three Landscapes: JB Blunk, Anna and Lawrence Halprin
Blum & Poe
Alongside the exhibition Three Landscapes: JB Blunk, Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Blum & Poe presents a conversation with Daria Halprin, scholar Janice Ross, and moderated by Laura Whitcomb. BLUM presented an exhibition of more than twenty ceramic works alongside salvaged old-growth redwood tables by the legendary Northern California-based artist JB Blunk, watercolors from Lawrence Halprin and paintings by Gordon Onslow Ford who all shared a passion for their natural surroundings as well as Japanese philosophy and aesthetics. Curated by Mariah Nielson and Ruthanna Halprin Hopper. This anticipates the upcoming exhibition for Further Triennial The Artist Within Us All that will be co-curated with Ruthanna Halprin at Minnesota St Project.
Galleria Carla Sozzani
Dalí, the Paradox of Fashion
On Thursday, June 21, 2018, Laura Whitcomb presented Dalí, the Paradox of Fashion at Galleria Carla Sozzani in Milan—an evening devoted to her book exploring Salvador Dalí’s fascination with fashion as both spectacle and alchemy. Whitcomb illuminated the Surrealist master’s lesser-known collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Paco Rabanne, and Kaisik Wong, as well as his iconic designs for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo’s Bacchanale. Rare excerpts from Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress (1971)—a film Dalí adored—were shown, revealing Arnold and Wong’s visionary tableaux vivants later echoed in the Teatre-Museu Dalí.